Former NBA All Star Stephon Marbury said he hopes to use his on-court skills to market his brand of low-cost basketball shoes when he laces up for China’s Shanxi Zhongyu in the coming weeks.
“I want to bring love to Chinese fans and I want to feel the love of the Chinese fans, so I’m going to play hard and work to help Shanxi win more games,” Marbury told yesterday’s Titan Sports Weekly, a Chinese sports paper.
“I’ve already decided, every game I’m going to give away shoes to the fans. This is my own brand — I hope they will like them,” he said in an interview from Houston, where he was in training ahead of his arrival in China.
In the interview, Marbury made it clear that only by winning basketball games would he be able to market his low-cost “Starbury” brand shoes to China’s 1.3 billion consumers.
“There are a lot of kids who cannot afford a shoe that costs more than 100 dollars, but their love for basketball is the purest so I thought I could help them,” he said of his trainers, which sell for as little as US$15 in the US.
Former world No. 2 Paula Badosa has withdrawn from this week’s Wuhan Open, organizers said on Tuesday, amid a racism row over an online photograph. Tournament organizers said the Spaniard had pulled out of the WTA 1000 tournament, citing a gastrointestinal illness, hours before her first-round match against Australian Ajla Tomljanovic. News outlets including Britain’s the Telegraph earlier reported that Badosa had posted a photo on Instagram in which she appeared to imitate a Chinese face by placing chopsticks on the corners of her eyes. The photo was taken last week in a restaurant in Beijing, where she reached the semi-finals of the
Shin Oebori coaches the Fukagawa Hawks youth baseball team in Tokyo, and he is very aware how Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani touches his players. “With Ohtani, the kids think everything is possible,” Oebori said, wrapping up practice yesterday on an all-dirt field set alongside a local Buddhist temple, below an elevated highway, and in the shadow of tall apartment blocks in central Tokyo. “Nothing is impossible with him. A dream is not a dream,” Oebori said, stepping out of the fenced practice field that keeps balls from landing on the temple grounds. None of the players hitting sponge-soft baseball has reached
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CRICKET Azhar’s 59 leads Stallions Aashir Azhar’s blazing half-century guided the Taipei Stallions to victory over Taipei Super 11 in the Taiwan Premier League’s Group A at the Yingfeng Cricket Ground in Taipei yesterday. The Stallions were 102-3 and into the 12th over of 20 when Azhar came to the crease. He hit seven sixes and two fours in the 25 deliveries he faced to push his side to 171-5. Gokul Kumar was the star with the ball for Super 11, taking 3-17. In the reply, Deepak Vishnu outscored Azhar with 77 from 50 balls, but nobody else got past 20 as
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